Sramana Mitra: Talk through the examples you mentioned. Let’s take the industrial example first. How much of this are you seeing across the industrial segment? Is this an anomaly, or is this kind of subscription consumer service happening at a larger scale?

Tom Dibble: That is interesting, because if you asked me that two years ago I would have said it is an anomaly and an exception. Today, the acceleration rate cannot be overstated. The adoption level we are seeing from companies that would not have considered launching a new recurring service, much less embracing cloud-based architecture to enable it, is amazing. This is just getting started. It is the very early days.

I think there are a couple of market forces driving this change and making it a reality. First and foremost the end consumers, whether that is the actual individual retail consumer or a business, are demanding different types of consumption models – whether that is subscription-based, use-based, or a combination thereof. Second, companies that do provide services in that flexible framework are being rewarded for it – they are being rewarded by more revenue, by customers, and also by Wall Street. They love business models with predictable recurring revenue cash flow. The multiples that are being applied to companies that can show that, and obtain, and retain high growth rates, are at a huge premium right now. More and more of these companies driven by both the investor base and the customer base are arriving at the conclusion that they have to be able to have these kinds of offerings. They don’t want to wait for legacy technology to make the reality. They are embracing cloud to make it a reality, and they are quick at doing so.

SM: What are other examples of industrial services that you are enabling?

TD: It is not so much industrial services, it is more traditional industrial companies that are launching new generations of online services – whether that is content services, cloud services, etc. There are many businesses nowadays that are making huge investments to move into a digital channel and looking at recurring services and rateable business models as the future of their business growth. Some of them are doing much of that on Aria. There are so many companies that are embracing these types of business models, because their customers and Wall Street are rewarding it, and they are looking at cloud-based services such as Aria that have proven to be enterprise grade in their offering to make it happen.

SM: Let’s switch the discussion to open source. You talked about Red Hat. Could you explain a bit about how the billing service works in the Red Hat scenario? Because Red Hat is an open source company. Supposedly they are not charging for their products. If you could elaborate on how your technology operates in that scenario, that would be great.

TD: We are seeing more and more companies that have data center capacity or are looking to build it and are saying, “Hey, I can also have platform as a service or infrastructure as a service. I have a very strong base of technology, so there is no reason I can’t layer in cloud service as part of my offering.”